Saturday, August 31, 2013

Human eggs in the IVF lab

When it
comes to your eggs , IVF
doctors tell a woman that the older you are , the less likely that the IVF procedure is going to work right
away. The eggs of a younger woman are going to be better in terms of the
odds of the procedure working, but this does not mean that an older woman cannot
have a child.

For
older women who are really desperate to have a child, the idea that their older eggs
are not as good as a younger women’s eggs may seem quite frustrating.However, what these women have to understand
is that this can be equally frustrating to the doctor.Because of these factors, a doctor may not be
as willing to take on an older woman as a patient because her chances of
conceiving are a lot lesser than a younger woman. In fact, many doctors routinely advise older women to use donor eggs, to maximise their chances of success.

IVF is the best diagnostic tool we have for checking your egg quality. When we retrieve your eggs and the embryologist looks at
them under the microscope, even abnormal eggs appear normal. This is because eggs are featureless spheres, and their appearance does not provide us with a clue as to their genetic competence or their ability to fertilise and cleave. The genetic information is locked up in the DNA within the nucleus; while the energy which drives embryo cleavage is provided by the mitochondria in the cytoplasm , which cannot be seen.

During IVF, your eggs are fertilized with sperm , and the embryologist will then check these at regular intervals to see how well they are developing . It's only after observing how eggs behave in the IVF lab after fertilisation which allow us to tell if the quality of the eggs of an older woman are as
good as a younger woman’s eggs - the proof of the pudding is in the eating !